John R. Smith

Dr. John R. Smith is an IBM Fellow at IBM Research and Manager of the IBM Research "AI for Math and Science" global team across IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, Silicon Valley Lab, Dublin Research Lab, Zurich Research Lab, and Tokyo Research Lab, as part of IBM Research Algorithms & Applications.

Dr. John R. Smith received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, where he received the Eliahu I. Jury award for outstanding thesis in the area of signal processing and communications. In addition to conducting some of the earliest work on content-based image retrieval, Dr. Smith together with Prof. Shih-Fu Chang created one of the first image and video search engines for the Web in 1996!

Dr. Smith has been broadly recognized as a research leader in the area of computer science, image, video, signal processing and multimedia, AI and machine learning. He received the ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award in 2020 "for outstanding, pioneering and continued research contributions in the areas of multimedia content analysis and retrieval and for outstanding and continued service to the multimedia community."

Dr. Smith was appointed IBM Fellow, in 2015, which is a technical distinction granted only to a little more than 330 people in the history of IBM!

Dr. Smith was elevated to Fellow, IEEE Computer Society in 2007 "for contributions to multimedia content analysis, retrieval and adaptation."

In terms of fun projects, Dr. Smith led one of the earliest successful generative AI projects in 2016 to create the movie trailer for a major Hollywood release.

Dr. Smith also led the early work at IBM Research on AI for sports highlights and commentary generation, which was deployed at Wimbledon, US Open and Masters Golf, and was subsequently recognized with a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for "AI-ML curation of Sports Highlights" in 2022.

Dr. Smith has authored several hundreds of articles at top conferences and journals. Dr. Smith is an inventor of more than 100 United States patents.  

You can see Dr. Smith combining his passions of science and running in the inspirational video "Fastest Path to Progress"

Some older activities and links which may include some videos:

2021

• Dr. Smith participated on the SIA America 'Future Forward: Frontiers in AI and Machine Learning Research and Innovation' panel on July 23, 2021 (video).

2020

• Dr. Smith gave the invited Technical Achievement Award keynote talk on 'The “Multi” in Multimedia' at ACM Multimedia in October 2020.

• Dr. Smith gave a keynote talk on “Efficient Video Understanding for Sports”, 6th International Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports (CVsports) workshop at CVPR, June 2020.

• Dr. Smith gave a keynote talk “Learning from Less Data”, Visual Learning from Limited Data workshop at CVPR, June 2020.

2019

• Dr. Smith gave a keynote talk on 'Challenges and Progress on Advancing, Trusting, and Scaling AI' at ACM Sensys, Nov. 2019.
• Dr. Smith gave a keynote talk on 'Learn more from Less: Latest from IBM Research in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning' at IBM Digital Developer Conference: AI & Cloud, Oct. 2019.
• Dr. Smith gave an invited talk on 'Multimodal Perceptual Understanding” CVPR Workshop on Precognition: Seeing through the Future, June 2019.
• _Dr. Smith gave a k_eynote talk on 'Learning More from Less”, CVPR Workshop on Vision with Biased or Scarce Data (VBSD), 2019.

2018:

• Dr. Smith gave an industry talk at the VISion Understanding and Machine intelligence (VISUM 2018) summer school on July 10, 2018.
• Dr. Smith gave a keynote talk on AI in the Enterprise and moderated a panel at the USC Computing Forum on AI in Life on May 17, 2018.
• Dr. Smith gave a presentation at The Frick Collection symposium on 'Searching Through Seeing: Optimizing Computer Vision Technology for the Arts' in New York City on April 9, 2018 (video).
• Dr. Smith gave a presentation on 'Creativity: the next horizon for AI' at Pausefest in Melbourne, Australia on Feb. 7, 2018 (video interview).

2017:

• Dr. Smith gave a lecture on 'Industry Opportunities and Challenges for Visual Comprehension' as part of the 2017-2018 Columbia University Computer Science Distinguished Lecture series on Oct. 23, 2017.
• Dr. Smith gave a keynote talk on 'AI Challenges and Opportunities for Image and Video Understanding' at IBM Research | Brasil Colloquium 2017 on “Inteligência Artificial” on Oct. 10, 2017.
• Dr. Smith gave a talk on 'Augmented Creativity' at the IJCAI-17 AI Festival event on Creative Machines at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) on Aug. 25, 2017.
• Dr. Smith gave an invited talk at the IJCAI-17 Industry Day in Melbourne, Australia on Aug. 25, 2017.
• Dr. Smith gave an invited presentation at the Tech Open Air (TOA) Conference on July 13, 2017 (video).
• Dr. Smith participated on a panel moderated by Steve Lohr on 'The Future of Augmented Intelligence' at the World Science Festival in New York City on June 3, 2017.
• Dr. Smith presented 'Opportunities to Improve Our Lives leveraging Visual Recognition at Scale' at the LDV Vision Summit in New York City on May 25, 2017.
• Dr. Smith presented an invited talk on 'Can AI be Creative?' at the Institute of Communications Agencies in Canada (ICA) FutureFlash conference on May 17, 2017.
• Dr. Smith gave a Tribeca Lounge Talk on 'The Quest for AI and Creativity' at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2017.
• Dr. Smith presented a plenary talk on 'New Challenges and Opportunities for Image Analysis in Healthcare' at IEEE Intl. Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2017 in April 2017.
• Dr. Smith presented an invited talk on 'Can artificial intelligence be creative?' at CPH – Art, Technology & Change at the CPH documentary film festival in March 2017.
• Dr. Smith participated on a panel on 'Convergence of VR and AI' at the MIT Tech Conference in February 2017.

2016:

• Dr. Smith was an invited guest speaker at the 'Nestlé Skin Tech Design Clinic' in December 2016.
• Dr. Smith presented a keynote talk on 'AI + Creativity for Filmaking' at La Digital Tech in December 2016 (video).
• Dr. Smith presented Watson’s Visual Recognition at the Watson Developer Conference (DevCon) plenary session in November 2016.
• Dr. Smith served on an invited panel on Multimedia Research and Products at IEEE Intl. Conf. on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) in July 2016.
• Dr. Smith was General Chair, ACM Intl. Conf. on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR-2016) in New York City in June 2016.

Prior:

• Dr. Smith gave an invited plenary talk at IEEE Intl. Symposium on Multimedia in December 2015.
• Dr. Smith is a co-founder and steering committee member of the Greater New York (GNY) Multimedia and Vision Meeting:

          - 4th Multimedia and Vision Meeting in Greater New York Area, October 2014

          - 3rd Multimedia and Vision Meeting in Greater New York Area, June 2013

          - 2nd Multimedia and Vision Meeting in Greater New York Area, June 2012

          - 1st Multimedia and Vision Meeting in Greater New York Area, February 2012

• Dr. Smith co-presented a tutorial with Liangliang Cao, Shih-Fu Chang and Rogerio Feris on Learning visual semantics: models, massive computation, and innovative applications at IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR-2014).
• Dr. Smith co-presented a tutorial with Liangliang Cao on Massive-Scale Multimedia Semantic Modeling at ACM Multimedia 2013.
• Dr. Smith gave the keynote talk at ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval Intl. Conf (SIGIR-2013).
• Dr. Smith was co-Technical Program Chair for ACM Intl. Conf. on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR-2013).
• Dr. Smith was co-General Chair for ACM Multimedia 2012.

Editor-in-Chief articles for IEEE MultiMedia (2010 - 2014):

• 'How Many Visual Concepts?', January-March 2014 (vol. 21 no. 1).
• 'Herding Cats', October-December 2013 (vol. 20 no. 4).
• 'Lessons in Learning', July-September 2013 (vol. 20 no. 3).
• 'Reconstructing Events', April-June 2013 (vol. 20 no. 2).
• 'Just the Facets', January-March 2013 (vol. 20 no. 1).
• 'Problems Gone By', October-December 2012 (vol. 19 no. 4).
• 'Rich Media, Poor Media', July-Sept 2012(vol. 19 no. 3).
• 'A Virtual Opinion', April-June 2012 (vol. 19 no. 2).
• 'Minding the Gap', January-March 2012 (vol. 19 no. 1).
• 'Open Channel for News', Oct.-Dec. 2011 (vol. 18 no. 4).
• 'History Made Everyday', July-Sept. 2011 (vol. 18 no. 3).
• 'A Great Challenge', April-June 2011 (vol. 18 no. 2).
• 'Express Yourself', January-March 2011 (vol. 18 no. 1).
• 'Clicking on Things', October-Dec. 2010 (vol. 17 no. 4).
• 'The Not So Newlywed Game', July-Sept. 2010 (vol. 17 no. 3).
• 'The Red Balloon', April 2010 (vol. 17 no. 2).

Publications:

• Dr. Smith on 'Google Scholar', 'DLBP'